Early childhood education and care (ECEC) can help lay the foundations for future skills development, well-being and learning. Having timely, reliable and comparable international information is essential to help countries improve their ECEC services and systems. For over 15 years, the OECD has been conducting policy analysis and gathering new…

This report provides an interim update to the Universities UK "Patterns" series, before the publication of the full "Patterns and Trends" publication in spring 2017. It includes updates of the main charts included in the 2015 publication, covering trends in student and staff numbers and finances of the UK higher education…

Chemical bonding knowledge is fundamental and essential to the understanding of almost every topic in chemistry, but it is very difficult to learn. While many studies have characterized some of the central elements of knowledge of this topic, these elements of knowledge have not been systematically organized. We describe the development and…

When choosing a career, jobseekers often want to know which occupations offer the best prospects. Generally, occupations that have rapid job growth, many new jobs, or many job openings--and good wages--promise better opportunities. This article shows how employment in particular occupations is projected to change over the 2008-2018 decade. The…

There are relatively few examples of quantitative approaches to quality control in educational assessment and accountability contexts. Among the several techniques that are used in other fields, Shewart charts have been found in a few instances to be applicable in educational settings. This paper describes Shewart charts and gives examples of how…

The "Surveys of Enacted Curriculum" (SEC) is a Web-based tool that provides K-12 mathematics, science, English language arts, and social studies teachers with consistent data, both on current instructional practices and the content actually being taught in their classrooms (the "how" and the "what"). Survey results are presented in clear and…

Ensuring science for all in the classroom requires that all students are afforded ways to grasp key science and engineering practices; however, we know that the practice of "obtaining, evaluating, and communicating information" can be a challenging task for children with high incidence disabilities (NGSS Lead States 2013, p. 15).…

The stories of college graduates burdened with mountains of debt and poor job prospects have been well documented in this recession year. But while these students do face real problems in today's tough economy, their degree will still likely prove to be a wise investment even as the recession draws to a close. This isn't the case for another group…

The economy's need for workers originates in the demand for the goods and services that they provide. So, to project employment, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) starts by projecting the gross domestic product (GDP) for 2018. GDP is the value of the final goods produced and services provided in the United States. Then, BLS estimates the…

Today, there is a growing agreement that students should leave high school "college- and career-ready." But what does that mean? And how can high schools tell if they are meeting the goal? This analysis identifies four characteristics of the most successful college readiness reports. (Contains 3 charts, 1 figure and 25 notes.)

This article, the second of a two-part series, features 13 "My Favorite Assignments" that were introduced at the Association for Business Communication's 82nd annual conference held in Dublin, Ireland, in 2017. The pedagogical innovations include assignments that teach students how to conduct primary research, present their findings,…

Word play is an important skill allowing product names, show titles, jokes, poetry and other writings or orations to be interesting, entertaining and well-remembered. This pretest--posttest counterbalanced study compared two instructional approaches for teaching second and third grade students (n = 71) word play skills. Students at a public…

Statistical graphs are commonly used in scientific publications. Unfortunately, graphs in psychology journals rarely portray distributional information beyond central tendency, and few graphs portray inferential statistics. Moreover, those that do portray inferential information generally do not portray it in a way that is useful for interpreting…

Maintaining comparability of test scores is a major challenge faced by testing programs that have almost continuous administrations. Among the potential problems are scale drift and rapid accumulation of errors. Many standard quality control techniques for testing programs, which can effectively detect and address scale drift for small numbers of…

The authors propose the use of performance control charts as a useful tool for tracking student assessments that rely upon faculty administered exams and projects as well as assessing teacher performance. This quantitative, formative evaluation process can be integrated into the classroom during an actual semester and utilized as a means to…